I port each creature one by one but as they are from the same author this means I add things to an existing package (started with a package with one creature). I basically Gather & Exit the lot and afterwards put the new creatures in the same package and run AV again. VERY VERY easy to make mistakes. It seems as if doing G&E when packages are disabled is not liked very much by AV. God all sorts of errors by AV like 'moving errors', stuff left behind etc (the package has NO .txt files BTW). Remark: for clumsy ppl like me a delete button would be a lifesaver.
As I could not find the spriggans bug I decided to call for help. Created a new package with nothing but spriggans and inserted into the AVP directory. As of then AV created an exception when you exit AV and AV starts importing things (quits at 1/10 of importing). I have the import at startup option SET. Have the logs. Removed the spriggan package. Had AV running again. Could create multiple new AV.esp without a problem (did not change anything, just reran the lot). NOW I copied the spriggan package back and I got again exceptions. Have tried to change the name of the name package but to no avail, still exceptions. The old and the new package have one thing in common, they contain the same spriggan .dds and .json files. COULD THIS BE THE PROBLEM. To test this is removed the specifications.json in the dir where skin resides (in earlier respons you told me that AV then just skips this variant). And now AV ran without problems. This gives me the impression that when AV processes variants which are excactly the same it has problems with it. One more test. In the original package X which had the 4 creatures and the spriggans I removed the spriggan variant winter. In the new package Y with only spriggans I removed everything but the spriggan variant winter. Effectively all variants for spriggans are still there but they do not exist twice in the AV package directory. Ran AV again AND it ran without problems!! It seems as if AV really does not like processing .dds files which appear more then ones in the AVP directory.
I would apreciate it if you could try to replicate this error/exception.
Another possibility is that I have FUBARRED my AV config !!!! I have AV prepping ON. In the worst case if I have to delete everything (AV textures, av.esp and skyproc patcher dir) and have start from scratch is it then still 'SAVE' or can I expect problems. Doing RTFM I read that deleteing av.esp is not the way to go.
PS. What is the function of the .reroute files like draugr_ndds.reroute (1 occurence), falmerm_n.dds.reroute (4 occurences). In the Bellyache package there are also 77 files similiar to those earlier described.